M3 was originally the popular Movex ERP application from Swedish firm Intentia before it merged with U.S. heavyweight Lawson in 2006. The new M3 campaign is spearheaded by Merit Consulting UK original Norwegian offshoot and also has a big presence in Finland.
To lead its new campaign, it has appointed Movex business veteran Mike Nutter who founded Intentia UK back in 1991. Nutter says that despite the application's dalliances with Sun Solaris and Windows over the years, well over 80% of M3 users are running on the i. The first vertical that Merit has set its sights on is food and beverage and specifically firms turning over less than £75 million.
M3 is already big in this sector and is used by household names in the Nordics such as Findus as well as brands closer to home that include Kerrygold. Although the Norwegian state dairy is running a huge clustered i install handling millions of transactions an hour, the typical M3 customer in the food and drink space is more likely to be running a 520 with a fair bit of extra disk capacity.

Nutter says: "There are a lot of very young and rapidly growing organic and ethnic food businesses, particularly in the UK, who are really the Heinzes of the future.   I think there’s a lot of energy in these businesses and they’ve probably started off with a PC-based system or they might have moved up to a Unix system, but they’re rapidly outgrowing the systems they’ve got and they need the kind of sophisticated systems that Lawson has."

He cites M3's traceability capabilities as a major driving factor for such firms at a time they are facing huge food safety compliance issues. Nutter says that these targets typically have ERP-type systems developed by small local software firms that have "run out of legs" in terms of functionality.